Photo by Sarah Finnegan.
Caedan Oliver and Sarah Schlund in front of their booth at the Whistle Stop Festival on Sept. 30 in Irondale. The pair runs a bakery called Beehive Baking Company that takes online orders and delivers baked goods to the Birmingham metro area and frequents festivals and farmers markets.
Baking is no easy feat: each batch requires patience, accuracy and a little bit of love. If you’re Caedan Oliver and Sarah Schlund, owners of Beehive Baking Company, you add a little bit of local, too.
Oliver and Schlund started Beehive Baking in Crestwood at the beginning of the summer after Oliver had been selling homemade breads to friends and coworkers for about four years. His interest in bread-making was piqued while he worked in an upscale grocery store in Mountain Brook years ago. After dealing with products that were remade or frozen, he decided to teach himself how to make breads from home.
Schlund is also a self-taught baker, specializing in brunch and dessert-style goods. She gained her experience by baking for a local coffee shop and bakery.
“We wanted to start a baking company because we didn’t view baking as a job, but discovered that it was our passion,” Oliver said. “We are inspired by fresh, seasonal and local products and wanted to offer our community baked goods that were influenced by those things.”
Beehive Baking Company was fed through social media, and soon expanded to include a weekly email list and recognition on the community app Nextdoor.
Customers can order from a revolving menu of breads, including country-style rustic wheat and rye blend, traditional soft white, challahs and brioche, as well as scones, cookies, hand pies, filled pound cakes and cupcakes. They also offer a selection of vegan scones and dairy-free cookies, and are working on increasing more allergy- and vegan-friendly options.
But their most coveted baked good is their sourdough bread.
“Our sourdough starter [is] made right at home,” Oliver said. He uses the traditional, European style to bake the bread. “We cultivated the wild yeast naturally and locally using whole grain rye flour and unbleached all-purpose flour and we feed it weekly.”
From there, the doughs are cared for by hand through the mixing, folding and shaping process to create a baked masterpiece. He said the entire process can take up to two days to complete small batches that are then hand-delivered directly to customer’s doorsteps.
And they use their baked goods to support the local community, too.
Schlund said in addition to featuring Alabama-grown crops, they also offer a 20 percent discount to any non-profit organization and give 5 percent of all profits to local environment non-profit organizations. Previous benefactors have included Ruffner Mountain Nature Preserve and The Cahaba Riverkeepers.
Next market season, Oliver and Schlund hope to grow their passion to local farmers markets and increase delivery availability, and hopefully moving Beehive Baking Company into its own space.
“We hope to expand into a storefront in the Crestwood/Woodlawn area sometime in the next couple of years,” Oliver said, “where we can produce more and invite our neighborhood friends and family to stop in, relax and enjoy.”
To learn more about Beehive Baking Company, find them on Instagram and Facebook as @beehivebakingcompany.
